Giuseppe Luchesa, 41 years old, born in Milan on July 17, 1965, has been Country Manager and General Manager of Psion Teklogix Italy since March 2004, a global provider of mobile computing and wireless data collection solutions. Luchesa began his professional career in 1987 at General Electric Information Services (G.E.I.S.), in the Operational Marketing department, supporting pre- and post-sales of some software products for creating value-added data communication and network solutions. In 1989, he moved to Symbol Technologies to focus on integrating batch data collection systems with host/server systems and related applications. During this period, the first radio frequency communication systems were developed, and Luchesa became actively involved in integrating this technology with host/server platforms. In June 1996, Luchesa started his experience at Teklogix, with technical/commercial responsibilities for designing solutions and supporting market development. In 1998, with the expansion of the Italian structure, he began organizing the pre- and post-sales structure as manager, reporting directly to the Country Manager, in addition to his previous duties. Thanks to his work, Teklogix experienced significant growth in market share. In July 2000, Teklogix merged with Psion and, consequently, the structure led by Luchesa, besides providing the necessary services for marketing products and solutions within the Italian territory, was reorganized to deliver the same services for the newly assigned area, the South Europe Region. Luchesa’s task is now to coordinate technical activities and commercial promotion within his assigned territory. In March 2004, he assumed the role of General Manager of Psion Teklogix Italy, a position he currently holds. Giuseppe Luchesa lives in Abbiategrasso. When not working, he enjoys spending his free time traveling and playing golf.
What is meant by RFID? It is a Radio Frequency Identification technology, without visual and physical contact, which allows — unlike the traditional barcode — a unique identification of the product. Moreover, RFID enables the tag to store a larger amount of data about the product compared to the barcode, which can be useful in many market sectors, and truly vital in some in particular (such as agri-food or pharmaceutical), where being able to monitor every phase of processing, transportation, and storage of a product until its commercialization to the final user is fundamental for protecting the latter.How is the Italian RFID market and what are its prospects? RFID in Italy is still a large potential market, characterized by great interest from companies and many opportunities to exploit. These prospects are being realized in some markets, such as asset management (i.e., managing assets, as, for example, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs did with its substantial stock of telephone devices), or the control of the food supply chain. Meanwhile, for others, like logistics, current regulations in our country still do not allow full development of this application: in fact, the UHF frequencies necessary for remote tag reading in Italy are allocated to the Ministry of Defense for military purposes and freeing them from this use is a process that, unfortunately, progresses at the speed of bureaucracy rather than business.What relationship do Italian companies have with RFID?Companies show great interest in the technology, even if a culture on the subject still needs to be developed: sometimes we receive requests for applications difficult to realize due to limited budgets allocated for implementation, or due to the regulatory difficulties mentioned above.What is Psion’s vision?Psion Teklogix strongly believes in this new technology and its commercial potential: for this reason, it commits itself to creating awareness in the business world, also through media relations, market-oriented events (such as the one on Tuesday the 21st at the Swiss Center in Milan on voice picking, for example), and so forth. We constantly invest in technology and product developments through our research laboratories in Aix en Provence, France, and Bracknell in the UK; furthermore, we actively collaborate with the RFID Lab of the University La Sapienza of Rome and with the Mobile Business Observatory of the Politecnico di Milano.Who is your typical customer?Essentially, they are industrial customers from various market sectors, logistics hubs and, prospectively, ports (for example, in this field a project is already operational for the Reefer Terminal in the port of Vado Ligure near Savona for tracking fresh fruit and vegetable products), interports, airports, and so forth. It has already been noted that in the future the RFID tag could contain all the individual information of a passport document, readable via biometric devices.Who are your competitors?Our greatest competitor in RFID is currently Datalogic.What does RFID offer more compared to competitors present in Italy, why choose you?Psion Teklogix, compared to the competition, offers a broader range of products for all frequencies, a project-based approach for analyzing the solution needed by the customer and its related implementation; in fact, to date RFID is not yet a so-called “plug & play” technology, it needs to be customized based on the needs and the reference market sector: it goes without saying that the information necessary for a client like CGT to track the movements of Caterpillar excavators rented to construction sites all over Italy is not the same as what Astra Zeneca needs for its pharmaceutical products!How did the last year go and what are your future goals?From a turnover point of view, RFID still accounts for a minority share of the overall business volume of Psion Teklogix — compared to the mobile computing instruments component — however, it shows a very interesting development rate, typical of a new technology in the introductory phase of its life cycle. The company is decisively investing in this direction and, if regulatory problems regarding frequency usage are resolved soon, we are certain that RFID in Italy will also reach the penetration it has achieved in other markets, such as the US one.
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